Women and children first

FEW topics are more thoroughly obscured by unsound information, contradictory religious and cultural beliefs, and illogical thinking than human reproduction and child-rearing practices. These subjects are also the source of the fiercest and most enduring clashes between the comparative biologists, who perceive the selective elimination of substandard or supernumerary offspring from its evolutionary perspective, physicians reared on the Hippocratic oath, religious dogmatists and political pragmatists intent on pleasing everyone. For more than a thousand years, the Roman Catholic church promoted chastity as the ideal human estate and regarded sexual intercourse as an evil but essential preliminary to reproduction. But, far from being delighted and thankful when scientists finally invented a way of breeding children without the need for intercourse, the church vigorously denounced the new technology as "unnatural". The biological origins of human "naturalness" and its role in our modern life are the central themes of this original and racily ...

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